Rhythm and restraint

Roughly speaking, architects can be divided into those who make exuberant, distinctive and adventurous buildings, and those who are quieter and more restrained.

In Sydney, the classic case would be Jorn Utzon's Opera House and Denton Corker Marshall's Governor Phillip and Macquarie Towers. In terms of houses, Durbach Block's cliff-edge Holman House might be at one end of the spectrum, with the more classical work of architect Alec Tzannes at the other.

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There are few who consistently do both and Spanish architect Elias Torres, of Martinez Lapena¿Torres, is one of them. His style is hard to pin down in a few words, but fellow architect Glenn Murcutt says he is among the most remarkable architects living today. And he is in Sydney this week.

Murcutt, recently back from Spain, where he toured several of Martinez Lapena-Torres's buildings, says all the work - from domestic architecture to city planning - is of the highest quality, reaching the level of art. With very simple materials, but using sophisticated technology, Torres creates modern work compatible with history -"where the old speaks to the new and the new speaks to the old".

Sydney architect Andrew Burges, who was a student at Harvard when Torres taught there in the '90s, says one of the things that makes Torres extraordinary is that while some of his designs have straightforward rectilinear geometries, others are a "bit more crazy and playful".

"He genuinely responds to situations, to client and terrain and the culture, in a completely different way each time," Burges says.

"He's not so obsessed about authorship. He has an enormous range."

Martinez Lapena-Torres is renowned in Spain for work on historic buildings using contemporary materials, often very fine steel, timber and concrete, to create incisions and additions that complement the existing buildings, making them viable for today.

In Toledo, for the remarkable Granja Escalators, the architects cut a 27.43 metre, six-stage escalator into the city's medieval wall and a neighbouring hill to connect with a car park below and provide an alternative to driving into the highly congested old city.

The firm designed the Olympic housing complex for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and the Forum Barcelona 2004, a new public space that links the city's Diagonal Avenue with the water. It helps to transform the long dismissed underside of the city - home to water treatment plants, power plants and the garbage incinerator - into a revitalised area that now has housing, hotels and a convention centre.

KNOW YOUR SURROUNDINGSTorres, who is the son of a boatbuilder from the island of Ibiza, says he learnt much of what he knows about architecture when he was growing up.

"Ibiza is 50 by 20 kilometres, my home town, and there I learnt the way things should happen in a place and how to work. I know the smell, the air, the light, the sea and the behaviour of people. I know the relationships between them.

"The dialogue I'm trying to find anywhere, for me, is very clear in Ibiza.

"That is the most important thing. When you work somewhere else, you must try to understand what this place is, the history, what it means, what are the layers of that place that can talk to you. You need to learn from this place how to behave there.

"If you need to be respectful or irreverent, it doesn't matter. It depends how much you want to push or provoke. We're not trying to be polite everywhere. Sometimes to be polite, you go in the opposite direction - to do something else, to express in a completely different way the spirit of place.

"I also have learnt from other architects I admire and from the city of Barcelona, and from being a student. Some others express through their work what you have already learnt. From school or professors, or other places, you reconstruct and rediscover and clarify what you learnt when a child."

An iconic restoration undertaken by the firm was the work on Gaudi´s Park Güell in Barcelona. Now, the firm is working on a five-star hotel in Zaragoza, renovations to a major historic public building in Barcelona, a museum in Ibiza, renovations to a 300-year-old farmhouse in Ibiza and four apartments for a cousin of Torres on the same island.

For houses, Torres says he likes to work for people with more modest budgets. Lots of money, he says, can make people less likely to solve architectural problems than when there are restrictions.

"You can become banal ... with modest budgets, you need to be more inventive in finding solutions and you can't waste anything. We adapt our work to any situation, but sometimes when you have less, you need to invent more."

Elias Torres will speak tonight at the University of Sydney as part of a lecture series with the Australian Architecture Association. Bookings online at http://www.architecture.org.au or 8297 7283.